Confess! Tell the most horrible thing you've done to your players

Bagpuss said:

For all they know (and it may well be true in my campaign) the Flameskull they met may be a unique creature. Which is part of what I like about RPGs you can just make stuff up and change stuff to suit.

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Sure, though I think that's less exciting and feels more "GOTCHA!!".

I had gargoyles, many of them, drag them over a cliff 1000 feet in the air while thousands of Zombies blocked their escape. I blamed Chris Perkins.

I created a magic item that zapped them for a small amount of damage anytime they grabbed it but didn’t do so again till they let it go.

The wizard had his familiar pick it up. When it was touched the guard came. They fought them and were retreating a bit. The wizard then had the familiar hand it to him over the rope bridge. He got zapped unconscious and nearly fell to his death.

First level, the NPC facing the party had a staff that turned into 20 metal swallows. They only had 1hp each, and did 1ho damage, but I gave them AC 20. The players hated that encounter.

Another time, I ripped off the Huntsmen of Annuvin from the Chronicles of Prydain: every time one of the band died, the rest gained hp, AC and attack bonus. The PCs managed to kill 2 before they were forced to run away.

In my 3.5E campaign, my players were all about buying magic items. They were practically walking Christmas trees by the time they reached 10th level; they would soak every single goldpiece into magical equipment, some characters having upward of 15 magic items in their inventory. It was getting absurd--armor classes over 30, almost every ability score over 20--the game was so front-loaded it was impossible to balance. I had to do something.

So I filled their next dungeon with corrosive oozes, rust monsters, and a beholder. They were practically naked by the time they escaped, and the game ran much more smoothly after that.

Ruin Explorer said:

Ignoring TPKs, which honestly, have largely been well-deserved*

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At the end of the day, I find this true, and that they bring it on themselves, I am only the neutral arbiter of consequences.

Sigh... alright.
Disclaimer: we were dumb kids in our early teens.

One player was playing a very annoying chaotic neutral wizard, classic instigator, committing crimes just for the lulz. As a young, inexperienced DM, I felt like taking drastic action.
The character was locked up in a cell together with a very peculiar inmate: a huge man, with ogre magi blood, who also happened to be high level monk. Basically, the true owner of the prison.
The wizard predictably acted like a jackass to him, as well. So he was kicked, repeatedly and powerfully, in his nether regions. He didn't die, but I was very precise in describing the very permanent damage that was dealt to his body.

I'm not proud of this little story. Bright side: chaotic stupid characters suddenly became a lot less common in my games.

...wait, does placing a bag of devouring count? Because I've totally done that before.

dragoner said:

At the end of the day, I find this true, and that they bring it on themselves, I am only the neutral arbiter of consequences.
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Exactly!

To be fair, I have seen DMs and adventures who were truly trying to cause a TPK or setting up a largely unavoidable situation where a TPK was nigh-inevitable, and that sucks, but the vast majority I've seen required an awful lot of bad decisions to be made for a sustained period. The Force Cage one back in 2E was in an adventure I'd run twice before, and that encounter had never killed anyone (perhaps surprisingly given the bow involved, but not really given the dude wearing it had no special defenses beyond a good AC, was a normal human, and was essentially one Hold Person or the like away from being invalidated). I've nearly caused a TPK by accident a number of times by rolling, but it's never actually happened. Closest was also in 2E when six goblins vs seven PCs had me rolling 4 nat 20s for the goblins in 1 round (and both other goblins hit) and the goblins had won initiative, so like 4 of the PCs were downed and bleeding out. Luckily the other three managed to kill the goblins. In early 4E I had 4 out of 5 PCs down in one encounter, but that was mostly due to them running face-first into a room, not good rolling. Ironically the one PC who finished off the enemies and kept them alive didn't survive the campaign.

I did an apocalypse Chuthulu game. Everyone makes characters of themselves. In game, The end of the world starts while the PCs are playing an RPG. It's all a bit meta.

In any case, the person hosting the game lives near a big lake. I called his wife ahead time (she wasn't going to be playing) and asked her to randomly start asking weird questions like, "hey, do you see people out in the lake?" "Who'd be out this late at night?"

His answers to the questions were, "probably the neighbors fishing" etc...

She kept it up, occasionally interrupting our game and even pretended to call the neighbors to ask about the "People on the Lake".

She then retired to the office to get some work done. I then started describing stuff in-game that resembled the stuff she'd been saying (all the while creepy music in the background).

Then I said,

"You suddenly hear a horrible scream from the office! Bob, it's the sound of your wife screaming!"

The scene continued for a bit and I could see that Bob was looking uncomfortable as it involved us barging into the locked office to discover his wife going missing and my 'character' (me) getting bludgeoned to death by his possessed neighbor..

Out of Character, I said, "Bob, you look uncomfortable, do you want to check on your wife?"

He stands up and goes to open the door to the office but it was locked. He starts frantically banging on the door but his wife was wearing headphones while she was working and never opened the door. We were laughing so hard. The poor guy. His wife thought it was hilarious.